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The colonial history of the Caribbean created a context in which many religions, from indigenous to African-based to Christian, intermingled with one another, creating a rich diversity of religious life. This book offers the first comprehensive religious history of the region. It begins with the religious traditions of the Amerindians who flourished prior to contact with European colonizers, then details the transplantation of Catholic and Protestant Christianity and their centuries of struggles to become integral to the Caribbean's religious ethos, and traces the twentieth-century penetration of American Evangelical Christianity, particularly in its Pentecostal and Holiness iterations. The book also illuminates the influence of Africans and their descendants on the shaping of such religious traditions as Vodou, Santeria, Revival Zion, Spiritual Baptists, and Rastafari, and the success of Indian indentured laborers and their descendants in reconstituting Hindu and Islamic practices in their new environment.

For most of its history, contemporary Paganism has been a religion of converts. Yet as it enters its fifth decade, it is incorporating growing numbers of second-generation Pagans for whom Paganism is a family tradition, not a religious worldview arrived at via a spiritual quest. This book explores the ways in which North American Pagan families pass on their beliefs to their children, and how the effort to socialize children influences this new religious movement. The first ethnographic study of the everyday lives of contemporary Pagan families, the book brings their experiences into conversation with contemporary issues in American religion. The book traces the ways in which Pagan parents transmit their religious values to their children. Rather than seeking to pass along specific religious beliefs, Pagan parents tend to seek to instill values, such as religious tolerance and spiritual independence, that will remain with their children throughout their lives, regardless of these children's ultimate religious identifications. Pagan parents tend to construct an idealized, magical childhood for their children that mirrors their ideal childhoods. The socialization of children thus becomes a means by which adults construct and make meaningful their own identities as Pagans. The book provides an illuminating look at parenting and religious expression in Pagan households and at how new religions pass on their beliefs to a new generation.

This book argues that cooking and talking are at the very quick of Black Atlantic religions. It shows that tasks like butchering, although manual, are far from menial, and “idle chatter” does a surprising amount of heavy lifting in Afro-Diasporic houses of worship. Its thesis is that such activities get under the skin of practitioners, equipping them with the repertoire of skills, dispositions, and habits necessary for religious norms to be internalized, then reproduced. The book maintains that to understand Black Atlantic religions, one must grasp not only their ethics and aesthetics but also their synaesthetics—the somatic and emotional dimensions of everyday experience. The book centers on two commonplace yet transformative kinds of kitchen work and talk: preparation of food for the gods and narration of stories about ritual experience. These undertakings are best described as “micropractices.” Micropractices like plucking chickens and trading anecdotes not only organize space, time, and intensities of affect for participants; they also progressively implicate their performers in the material and conceptual worlds of religious authorities.Indeed, the book demonstrates that individuals are transformed into religious subjects through their enactment of micropractices at the interstices of better-known rituals. Furthermore, in seeking to provide a more accurate understanding of women and gay men—particularly those deemed effeminate—as social actors within Afro-Diasporic houses of worship, it reconceptualizes the role of race, gender, and sexuality in religious subjectivity.